Impact of Agility on the Business IT Alignment Kawtar Imgharene 1 , Karim Doumi 2 and Salah Baina 1 1 I Ensias, Mohamed V Rabat University, Morocco 2 FSJESR, Mohamed V Rabat University, Morocco kawtar_imgharene@um5.ac.ma, kdoumi@um5.ac.ma Keywords: Business IT Alignment, Agility, IT Agility, Business Agility. Abstract: A strategic alignment with a strictly constant rhythm assumes stability. There are several factors that influence this stability. The strategic alignment must be evolutionary, long-term, and dynamic in spite of those factors. In our case we opted for the agility. Agility has a global impact on the internal and external environment of an organization. Agility concerns the future of the organization/company. It is this concept which became a standard for business models since the rhythm of the change in companies accelerates. The current article reflects this idea, by describing the nature of the relation between the factor of agility and the strategic alignment in the determination of various types of agility. Furthermore, we try to establish in this article if an aligned system can stay so, by transforming the company into an agile one. A transformation on all the levels of abstraction is going to maintain the alignment on the long term and will give an added value, and a way the changes can be detected in reality and be gradually integrated within the framework of the strategic alignment. 1 INTRODUCTION Over the years, particularly during the last two decades, there has been a fast technological advancement which has changed the way in which firms behave. They need to try to get the excellence and remain competitive in a world that is stimulated by the same advancement in Information Technology (IT). A key success factor for a successful business in a dynamic business environment is an effective and efficient IT strategy capable of supporting the strategies and processes (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993). A situation has therefore arisen, asking for a strategic integration of trades with the IT. It is because of this that most current agencies are trying to implement IT governance with the model's support variables, in order to be able to reach one of the ultimate objectives, namely the alignment between business strategy and IT. If this alignment is inadequate, the enterprise processes would not take full advantage of the technological means invested (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993). In effect, the changes often influence the organization in its entirety, concerning the business processes in the information system. However, it is important for organizations if they aim at staying competitive, to respond quickly and flexibly to anticipated changes. In previous studies and research, it was observed that the strategic alignment is affected by several factors, to cite only a few of them: communication between IT and strategy, the sharing of knowledge between IT and strategy, the flexibility of environment, the agility of the system, the ambiguity, and so on. For this study, we have put the emphasis on agility due to some reasons which will be mentioned further on in the current article. In a chaotic environment in which markets are emerging, evolve and die, one of the main success determinants of a company is agility, the ability to remain flexible in the face of new developments, continuously adjusting the strategic company direction and developing innovative ways of creating value. The competitive environment has significantly evolved over the past few years. Companies should adapt fast to unpredictable changes. However, recent research also indicates that organizations can fall into a trap where the inflexible rigidity may impede or delay the ability of an organization to respond to environmental changes (Benbya and McKelvey, 2006) (Tallon and Pinsonneault, 2011). It is challenging for any business to anticipate changes and adapt quicker and more effectively. What is underlying with regard to agility is: change. 233 Kawtar I., Baina S. and Doumi K. Impact of Agility on the Business IT Alignment. DOI: 10.5220/0006529500000000 In Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2017), pages 233-237 ISBN: 978-989-758-238-7 Copyright c  2017 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 233